July 16, 2015

Taking a radical research approach to understanding autism, Yale School of Medicine researchers converted skin cells from autism patients into stem cells and then grew them into tiny brains in a dish — revealing unexpected mechanisms of the disease.

July 16, 2015

How do you visualize your memory? As a continuous video recording, or as a series of snapshots strung together?

According to Johns Hopkins scientists, who actually watched nerve cells firing in the brains of rats as they planned where to go next, it’s a series of snapshots — more like jumping across stepping stones than walking across a bridge.

July 16, 2015

A team of researchers has developed a tiny “wireless optofluidic neural probe” the width of a human hair that can be implanted in the brain and triggered by remote control to deliver drugs and activate targeted populations of brain cells.

The technology, demonstrated for the first time in mice, may one day be used to treat pain, depression, epilepsy, and other neurological disorders in people by targeting therapies to… read more

Trojan-horse strategy make the cancer's own enzymes rip up nanoparticles, releasing drugs

July 15, 2015

Scientists have engineered a drug delivery system that uses specially designed nanoparticles that release drugs in the presence of a specific enzymes — the very ones that enable cancers to metastasize.

“We can start with a small molecule and build that into a nanoscale carrier that can seek out a tumor and deliver a payload of drug,” said Cassandra Callmann, a graduate student in chemistry and biochemistry… read more

July 15, 2015

Unless humans slow the destruction of Earth’s declining supply of plant life, civilization like it is now may become completely unsustainable, according to a paper published recently by University of Georgia researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“You can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years,” said the study’s lead author,… read more

Man has anesthetic at dentist, leaves with 90-minute memory and belief that every day is the same

July 15, 2015

Gerald Burgess, a University of Leicester lecturer in clinical psychology, has described treating an individual who suffered a “Memento/Before I Go to Sleep“-style anterograde amnesia memory loss after a treatment at a dentist — “like nothing we have ever seen before.”

Since the one-hour root-canal treatment, during which the a 38-year-old man from the UK was given a local anesthetic, the individual cannot remember anything… read more

July 14, 2015

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a patent (US 9,068,562) to Boeing engineers and scientists for a laser- and nuclear-driven airplane engine.

“A stream of pellets containing nuclear material such as Deuterium or Tritium is fed into a hot-stop within a thruster of the aircraft,” Patent Yogi explains. “Then multiple high powered laser beams are all focused onto the hot-spot. The pellet is… read more

July 14, 2015

3D printers could revolutionize food processing in the next 10 to 20 years, said Hod Lipson, Ph.D., a professor of engineering at Columbia University, speaking at IFT15: Where Science Feeds Innovation.

“The technology is getting faster, cheaper, and better by the minute. Food printing could be the killer app for 3D printing.”

Has a thermal conductivity capacity four times higher than copper, can be attached to silicon electronic components

July 13, 2015

A method for efficiently cooling electronics using graphene-based film — with a thermal conductivity capacity four times higher than copper — has been developed by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology. The film can be attached to computer chips and other silicon-based electronic components.

Electronic systems available today accumulate a great deal of heat, mostly due to the ever-increasing demand on functionality. Getting rid of excess… read more

July 13, 2015

IBM Research has announced the semiconductor industry’s first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips, which could allow for chips with more than 20 billion transistors, IBM believes — a big step forward from today’s most advanced chips, made using 14nm technology.

IBM achieved the 7 nm node through a combination of new materials, tools and techniques, explained Mukesh Khare, VP, IBM Semiconductor Technology Research in a blog post.… read more

July 13, 2015

Don’t freak out if you see a 40-foot bus resembling a coffin sometime soon. It’s the “Immortality Bus” — a “pro-science symbol of resistance against aging and death” to be driven across the U.S. by futurist and 2016 Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, along with scientists and supporters.

July 10, 2015

European scientists have taught volunteers in an experiment how to determine the thickness of a titanium dioxide thin film only a few nanometers thick by simply observing the color it presents under under highly controlled, precise lighting conditions, according to Sandy Peterhänsel, University of Stuttgart, Germany and principal author of an open-access paper in the journal Optica.